.png)
A free e-book is included in this post.
Marketing with website analytics
In the last post I shared the various digital marketing analytics data that you can look at. Starting with this post, I will share more information on key metrics of website analytics data. Deriving actions for marketing with website analytics will help you tackle the most important metrics. I will be using the data from Google Analytics. You can request my free e-book, which details the strategy based on this data analysis, by filling out this form.
Website visitor data
The first thing you need to do is to track the website visitor data. This will tell you how popular your website is. Group your traffic by week to see trends or leave it as daily view if you want to see the influence of a campaign.
To draw conclusions from the data, think about what the data means. Below data is from a website publishing blogs frequently. Data shown is over a 2-month duration.
From this data, we know the following:
The website has a good number of visitors. Whether this is enough or not, would depend on the goal set by the website owner.
The website traffic is showing an upward trend in the later half. The website owner should identify whether this increase in traffic was due to an action taken or it is a seasonal trend.
Number of sessions per user is very low considering this website contains many articles. So, overall bounce rate is also high for a blog.
Average session duration is also very low for a blog. It should be equal to or more than the average read time of an article.
The website is getting very little returning traffic as 90% of the people only visit the blog once. The website owner should create opportunities for users to visit again.
Demographics of users
Data for demographics of user is pretty straightforward. It breaks down all your users by age and their gender. Then, you can dive down into each age group or gender to see how engaged they are.
In the example of the blog, the gender did not matter. But, the age group with the most users was not the target audience. Drilling down into the target age group will give inputs on what they like on the website and how they came to the website.
Source of traffic
Personally, I think source of traffic is the most important metric of a website. The overview is quite simple and tells you which channels bring in traffic. You should see a healthy mix of traffic from organic, direct and social media. The traffics from paid search, referral and emails depend on when you are running campaigns for those channels. You can also see the user behaviour of each channel to understand which channels bring in the best user.
It’s the level of detail in this metric that makes it more interesting. When you are tracking by source, you can see the detailed performance of your paid ads, SEO, social media posts, email marketing and referrals.
In this example, the site is getting a large chunk of people from organic search. This means that the site is doing well in search results. Further analysis is needed to understand whether this traffic is relevant. Conversely, the site gets almost no traffic from social media posts despite having a large following on several platforms. Definitely the social media posting strategy needs to be improved.
Search terms within your website
One important aspect of a large website is the searches that people perform on the website. If you have a blog or an e-commerce platform, then adding a search bar is a must. This prevents the users from leaving your site if they cannot find what they are looking for. Google Analytics gives you details about the search terms within your website
In this example, the most searched term during this period is ’32 stories’ which shows more than 1 result. Since the website has the article on ’32 stories’, the exit from this search term is 0%. Your goal should be a low exit rate from every term that is relevant to you.
This post covered the most important data that you can see in your website analytics tools. Marketing with website analytics data as your guide will improve your strategy significantly. You can easily pick up the skill of reading the data, but drawing conclusions from it will take some practice. I hope this post and the strategy document have helped to unlock your analytical and strategic skills.
Want the free e-book? Fill out this form.
If you liked this post and would like more tips on other tools, then please subscribe to my blog.
And if this blog helped you, please share it with your friends.